Patrons line up outside the Phoenix Theatre to attend shows during the Indianapolis Theatre Fringe Festival Monday August 20, 2012. / Joe Vitti / The Star

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Sitting on the patio of Ralston's DraftHouse, open less than a month but packed almost every night, it's hard to imagine Mass Ave and the neighborhoods around it as desolate.

Then again, I've lived in Indianapolis for only seven years.

I don't have the history of Bryan Fonseca, co-founder and producing director for the Phoenix Theatre, for 25 years located a few blocks from what today's Downtown dwellers call "The Ave."

He's seen the district's ups and downs, the boarded-up buildings turned into pricey condos and houses, and he can't help but be proud of the Phoenix's role in helping to make that happen.

For Fonseca, it's a season for reflecting.

The Phoenix Theatre will celebrate its 30th birthday this weekend with free events on Friday and Saturday. It's a reason for the arts community to cheer, for sure. But it's also an opportunity to understand how a pioneering anchor institution that commits to a struggling urban neighborhood can help transform an area. Revitalization often has a ripple effect.

That was certainly the case for Mass Ave and the surrounding neighborhoods. Thirty years ago, there were only a handful of businesses along the main commercial corridors, mostly bars, including the Chatterbox and Old Point Tavern, and a handful of other shops and a few art galleries.

David Andrichik, who bought the Chatterbox Jazz Club in 1982, described it this way: "People say it was kind of like Skid Row, but it wasn't dangerous. It was just run down."

Here's how Fonseca describes it: "It was deserted. There were people passed out in doorways on the weekends. It was a rather seedy kind of scene down there. But you know artists, we'll go anywhere."

"Anywhere" for the Phoenix became a former church in the Mass Ave neighborhood known as Chatham Arch. How it got there is a bit of a story.

The Phoenix Theatre started off 30 years ago as a splinter group of the for-profit Broad Ripple Playhouse. Several artists, including Fonseca, decided to form the nonprofit Phoenix so it could apply for grants that would enable actors to earn better wages.

"We moved down from Broad Ripple, which was the hot area," Fonseca said. "But this was when Circle Centre (Mall) was just holes in the ground, and it was all back when Downtown would close up on Friday night and not reopen until Monday morning."

The Phoenix Theatre's first home was the Ambassador building just north of the Indianapolis Central Library. The building was every bit as empty and run down as one might imagine, with transients hanging out at all hours of the day and night.

"We've got some wild stories about people carrying in buckets of catfish that they caught that day. But for the plays we were doing, like on urban life, it was perfect. We could say, 'This is real life.' "

Five years later, the Phoenix moved to its current home on Park Avenue. At the time, the neighborhood was filled with abandoned, boarded-up homes and lots of overgrown grass. It was nothing like today, when people are unafraid to ride bikes through these same neighborhoods late at night.

It was only the actors' reputation, forged while still at the Broad Ripple Playhouse, that encouraged people from other parts of the city to venture to The Ave for weekend shows.

"It helped us when prominent members of the community told their friends that they go to the Phoenix and others began to think the neighborhood wasn't that bad," Fonseca said. But still, "people would come in to see a show, but as soon as that show ended, they were gone."

In the long run, the audiences' exposure to the area proved crucial to its rebirth. The Phoenix, known for putting on quirky, edgy productions, attracted just the kind of people who would start businesses, buy houses and invest in a neighborhood on the edge.

"Artists, we plant our seeds and then things start taking off, and then soon the problem is we can't afford to be there and we go someplace else," Fonseca said. "And that's exactly what happened here."